Mrs. Graves made a futile attempt to sway the throng as the Foot brothers riveted the sign in place. “Repent, O ye sinners. Turn and be forgiven, Elliot Foot.” But Elliot didn’t turn; he held the door open while his first customers streamed inside the cool bar. “I see you on a darkening path,” Freda warned. “O Lord, the way is dim. A tear disappears in a well. A soul shrivels in Hell.”
Gwen and I sneaked up to the door with everyone else. Inside the bar the light was murky, the air already clouded with smoke. We had just poked our heads over the threshold when I felt a swat on my behind. I whirled to face my attacker. It was Nina, my sixteen-year-old sister. “Lizzie Macon, you better get your little ass home if you want to have any butt left to sit on,” she said. “Daddy would skin you like a rabbit if he saw you here.” She glared at Gwen. “You too, Gwen Holler. Children got no business hanging around a bar.”
Gwen said, “You’re not my sister. I don’t have to listen to you.” Then she stuck out the tip of her pointed tongue and darted inside.
I don’t know who made me madder: my sister for spoiling our fun, or Gwen for going inside without me. But Gwen was already out of sight and Nina was right in front of me. When she took hold of my arm, I shook her loose and said, “I wish you’d leave me alone. I wish I didn’t have a sister.”
The next summer, my cruel wish became a curse. Nina disappeared. When you live in Willis, Montana, you know there aren’t too many places to run where they won’t find you within the hour and drag you back to your own front door. But my sister found a place, and it was a long time before any of us saw her again.
Before Nina vanished, she dug through the shoe box Mom kept stashed in the hall closet and carefully cut her own head out of each photograph. She didn’t want to see posters of herself stuck on every telephone pole for a hundred miles. She left the rest of us intact, so we’re still there, grinning stupidly at the camera. I see Nina’s legs and Nina’s pink dress, the one I yearned for but never wore. I see Nina’s hands clasped in front of her, and I recognize her wrists as easily as I would recognize her face. My sister.
In the photographs I am a skinny child with big knees. I keep my hands in my pockets or behind my back. I always thought my arms were too long. Whatever the year, my hair is chopped off short. Mother had a fear of ticks and lice and believed in prevention. She said I didn’t take care of myself. I look like a freckled boy forced to wear a dress. My eyes are pale and surprised, as if the flash frightens me every time.
One of my parents is always missing from the picture, but I feel them behind the camera, creating us again and again. Mother has a tiny waist and thin hands. Though I am still a child, I can see the startling ways I will outgrow her. My hidden hands are monstrous. She wears faded dresses, but the cloth is good. Her shoes have chunky heels and tight laces. She is a sensible woman.
The pictures have no colors, only shades of gray, but I remember. Mother’s hair had a red glow when she stood in sunlight. Every morning she drew it back into a perfect knot, held fast with half a dozen invisible hairpins.
There are deep lines at the corners of Father’s eyes. No matter what the season or time of day, he seems to be squinting into the sun. I see him squeeze Nina’s headless shoulders. He is blond, like her, the handsome father of a beautiful girl. His nose is too big, his brows too dark for his fair hair. By afternoon his stubble makes his face look dirty. These imperfections save him. He cannot stop grinning. He pats my head, but he is thinking only of my sister. I scowl. He stoops to kiss her cheek, and she’s not there.
3
THE FIRST year Nina was gone I kept telling myself she’d be back any day. The second year my mother cleaned out Nina’s drawers and closet. She took the clothes to the Salvation Army in Rovato Falls and stopped at the dump on the way home to heave a garbage bag into the pit. The bag split before it touched the ground. Makeup and perfume, tarnished jewelry and barrettes, tattered romance novels and ticket stubs with boys’ names on the back spun and fluttered toward the rotting heaps of strangers’ refuse, toward the junked cars and the decaying corpses of the rats that young boys had shot with their fathers’ rifles.
After that day Nina began to fade. I couldn’t open the closet and catch a whiff of her, lingering on all her clothes; I couldn’t see her leaning close to the mirror, worrying over one tiny pimple on the side of her nose.
Nina had always protected me. She saved me from a thrashing that day at the Last Chance Bar, which made my outburst all the more unbearable. She knew Father was apt to strike first and ask questions later. Better to punish unjustly than to let a child escape without rebuke. If I wasn’t guilty of that crime, surely I had done something else, something unknown. I deserved every blow. But Father never touched Nina, not until the night she left. She could tease him out of anger, cajole him with laughter, leave him helpless with her smiles.
As I grew older I learned to fool Daddy but not to charm him. Four years after Nina disappeared I still longed for her to leap to my defense, to shelter me and speak for me. I remembered the last winter she was with us. Late one afternoon in early December my cousin Jesse and I pegged snowballs at the Lutheran church. Jesse had shaggy light hair and his teeth were too big for his mouth. He was always in trouble, but the snowballs were my idea. How were we to guess that Reverend Piggott would be at church on Wednesday? How were we to know that the thud of snow would jar him from his prayers and turn the frail minister into a raving prophet, a man with a vision of our imminent doom?
Reverend Piggott believed in the evil of children; he depended on it. Twisting our ears, he dragged us inside and made us stare at the crucifix above the altar, the image of our Lord. I wasn’t afraid of God. I couldn’t imagine He’d plunge me and Jesse into the fires of hell for throwing a few snowballs, and I thought Reverend Piggott was a bit of a fool to suggest God might be so petty. But I didn’t argue. The reverend kept a ruler beside his Bible at the pulpit; I had seen him use it in the heat of a sermon, slapping wood on wood, creating his own thunder. As we stood before the pained Jesus, Reverend Piggott took the stick to our palms, those wicked hands that had packed the snow hard and hurled it at God’s holy house. Jesus hung. His palms bled. My eyes burned. Jesse kicked Reverend Piggott in the shin and ran, and I took a second licking for his sake.
“Ask Jesus to forgive you,” Reverend Piggott hissed. And I did, but the wooden Jesus did not speak or raise his head.
At home, Nina helped me hide my wounds. Father would have given me a set of marks on my butt to match my palms if he knew what I’d done. Mother would have marched down to the Lutheran church and told Reverend Piggott she’d have him arrested if he ever laid a hand on one of her children again. I didn’t want another whipping, but I feared I didn’t deserve Mother’s fierce defense. Only Nina could save me, my sister who hid me and kissed my palms. There, baby, she whispered, all better.
The fourth year Nina was gone I discovered I still wished for her protection, and the need rose in me like a living thing. It had to do with Gwen Holler.
Gwen and I ran wild in the summer of 1969. We were full of the sudden knowledge that bloomed from the changes in our bodies, or, at least, the changes in her body. Gwen had taken on the shape of a tiny woman. She was already fourteen, a few months older than I was, as she often reminded me. In her basement, she unbuttoned her blouse to show me the swell of her breasts, the dark circles around her nipples. I thought of Nina in the woodshed with Rafe Carson; I heard Mother’s hard slaps. I longed to touch her again, to soothe her, just as I longed to touch Gwen Holler. I wanted to have something to show Gwen, some womanly change that would surprise her, but my arms were still too long, my knees too big. I had nothing to reveal, yet I felt sure that what was happening to her must be happening to me too.